The Future Will Be BS Free Read online

  “I’m speaking live with Molly Burroughs, spokesperson for the so-called TruthCorp, manufacturer of the truth app. How are you today, Molly?”

  “Doing well, Roshanna.”

  Roshanna crossed her legs. “Ms. Burroughs, are you aware that the distribution of your product is directly responsible for the failure of sixteen American corporations, including most recently Patriot Bank?”

  “I’d say fraud and corruption are responsible for those failures,” Molly shot back without missing a beat. “If no one had lied, there would have been nothing for the truth app to expose.”

  “How about the two hundred eighty-seven suicides your truth app has been linked to? I guess that’s not your problem, either?”

  “The truth app lets you know when people are lying to you. That’s all. Are you saying that’s a bad thing?” Molly licked her lips. The contempt on Roshanna’s face was withering.

  “Why don’t we ask Ellory Mika, whose daughter Claire was one of those suicide victims?”

  A subscreen opened in the air beside Roshanna, showing a stone-faced woman with unkempt hair.

  “Mrs. Mika, I am so sorry for your loss,” Roshanna said.

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Mika croaked.

  “Your daughter Claire was twelve? Is that right?”

  “Twelve. Yes.”

  “And she’d had surgery that required her to wear a colostomy bag.”

  “That’s right.” A tear rolled down Mrs. Mika’s cheek. “She wore loose clothes so no one at school would know. She was terrified the other kids would find out. Then, two weeks ago, one of them brought one of those tattle machines to school and started questioning everyone, trying to dig up dirt, to humiliate his classmates.” Mrs. Mika wiped tears from under her eyes. “She was such a beautiful girl.”

  A photo of Claire appeared on the screen.

  “Is there anything you want to say to Molly Burroughs, Mrs. Mika?” Roshanna asked.

  Mrs. Mika raised her gaze. “Are you making a lot of money? Enough to make it worth my daughter’s life?”

  It felt like there was a fist in my stomach.

  Molly’s eyes filled with tears. “My God, we never meant for anything like that to happen. We’re trying to make things better for people—”

  “How many more suicides and bankruptcies will it take before you figure out that you’re not making things better?” Roshanna asked. “Is your mother proud, Molly?”

  I signaled to Molly to end the interview. She ignored me, leaned forward in her seat. “President Vitnik tortured my friend’s mother. Vitnik lied, and you’re the ones spreading those lies. You told everyone we were wiping people’s memories.”

  “And it turns out all you’re really doing is crippling the U.S. economy and causing thousands of deaths.”

  Molly pointed a trembling finger at Roshanna’s perfect little nose. “We exposed the worst traitor in American history.”

  Roshanna Lupe raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure about that? I think I know a worse one.”

  “Cut the feed,” I said to Rebe. The screen went blank. “We should have known it would be an ambush. Unbelievable. They can twist anything.” I tried to sound outraged, but the dead girl’s face was dancing in my vision. People had died because of us. Good people. An innocent kid.

  Basquiat gave Molly a hug. “You did wonderfully.”

  “You did. Awesome job,” I said. Below us a forklift rolled by, carrying sealed crates filled with truth apps hot off the assembly line.

  Molly wiped tears from her cheeks. “That poor girl.”

  Beltane was jogging toward us from the far end of the floor, the clack-clack-clack of her bladed feet echoing off the concrete.

  “There’s a crowd forming outside the gates. Someone figured out our location from the background,” she said to Mr. Chambliss. “They want truth apps.”

  We followed Mr. Chambliss and Beltane outside.

  There were about a hundred people gathered, with more arriving. The road was lined with parked vehicles.

  “Sam!” I heard someone call through the noise when we were about fifty feet from the gate. “Come on, Sam, buddy, set me up?”

  “Come on. How much?” someone else shouted.

  People were waving credit cards, even cash.

  Off to our right, a handful of twentysomethings were rattling the fence, which was topped with barbed wire.

  Beltane strode toward them. “Cut that out right now, or I’ll pull your damned arms off.”

  “We’re not selling them here!” I shouted.

  People booed.

  They booed even louder as we headed toward the factory doors. This was insane. We shouldn’t have agreed to the interview. My stomach was in knots after seeing that poor girl’s mother.

  * * *

  —

  They were packed twenty deep. It reminded me of the mob that had circled the White House. In a few places the fence rattled and swayed as the mob pushed against it.

  “This is not good,” Beltane said.

  Kelsey spit sunflower seed shells into the grass. “We have a dozen heat guns. We could turn them on the crowd.”

  “Except the people you’ll hit are the ones closest to the fence, and they have nowhere to go.” I studied the crowd. “We have to get the people in the back to move first.”

  “What are we going to do?” Beltane said. “Ask them nicely?”

  “No. Just give them what they want. Once the crowd moves away from the fence, keep them away with the heat guns.” I turned to my friends. “Who wants to play Santa with me?”

  * * *

  —

  The helicopter was black and silver, narrow at the front and fat at the back, like a flying lightbulb. With one of the newer vets, a guy named Cliff, piloting, we rose from the roof and headed out, beyond the fence.

  “Right here,” I said. We hovered thirty feet off the ground, fifty yards out from the crowd. I turned to Molly and Basquiat. “Bombs away.”

  Laughing, they began dropping handfuls of boxes. Truth apps. The boxes rained down into the weeds.

  The crowd raced for the apps.

  “Now move slowly away from the fence,” I said.

  Cliff inched us away, with Molly and Basquiat feeding a steady stream of truth apps out the side of the helicopter. The crowd followed, which took them farther and farther from the fence.

  “I’m out,” Basquiat announced after a few minutes.

  Molly dropped a double handful. “Me too.”

  We rose and headed back to the roof. At this point, Rebe would be telling the crowd that was all we had for now and they should go home and, whatever they did, to stay away from the fences.

  Some people headed back toward the fences anyway. They didn’t get within fifty feet before they were brought to their knees by the heat guns. They’d been warned.

  I twitched, recalling the agony of my close encounter with one of those guns. We couldn’t let a mob overrun the factory, though, and we’d asked them nicely to leave. Still, the irony wasn’t lost on me.

  Within twenty minutes, there were only a few hundred stragglers, and they kept their distance.

  My attention was immediately drawn to the gigantic, tubelike gun in the corner. “Is that a rocket launcher?”

  Beltane, who was rummaging through a rack of cream-colored head-to-toe catsuits, glanced my way. “Yep.”

  We owned a rocket launcher. Jeez.

  Beltane pulled a catsuit from the rack. “Try this one.”

  I took the suit from her. “Hard to believe these can stop a bullet.”

  “It won’t keep a head shot from fracturing your skull, but bullets can’t penetrate the material.”

  I wanted to see for myself what was going on out in the world. These high-tech long johns were the price of admiss
ion. I looked around for somewhere to change.

  Beltane noticed me looking around and burst out laughing. “You can leave your underwear on.”

  “I know.” I turned around and pulled my shirt over my head. I was a little sensitive about undressing in front of people, due to my scrawniness. I kept hoping I was going to fill out one of these years. It wasn’t like I didn’t eat.

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Beltane. She was changing into a suit as well, three feet away from me. A series of wide, ragged scars ran from her left shoulder blade down to her rib cage and then wrapped around her side.

  I caught her eye reflected in a shiny silver canister of ammo for the rocket launcher. “Shrapnel from a four-legged drone,” Beltane said without turning around. “It took a direct hit from an RPG. Half of the thing flew right at me. Took my left arm at the shoulder, my left leg at the knee.”

  Busted as a Peeping Tom for the second time. It hadn’t been intentional this time—if I’d realized Beltane was undressing, I wouldn’t have turned. But the similarity reminded me of Molly, and suddenly I felt so ashamed, remembering what I’d done. When I got back I needed to apologize to Molly again, and do it right this time.

  Beltane finished dressing and turned around. “How does that fit?” She pulled the hood onto my head, tugged the suit at my shoulders and stomach. “Good. It’s needs to be snug.”

  I felt like I was wearing too-tight underpants over my whole body.

  “Let’s get moving. We’re burning daylight.”

  * * *

  —

  There were more bicycles on the road than cars. We passed a gas station; the price on the sign out front was $9.99 a gallon, twice what it had been a few months ago. Below that outrageous price was a handwritten sign: No Gas.

  “Once this tank is empty, I’m not sure how we’re going to fill it again,” Kelsey said.

  The roads of downtown Trenton were clogged with pedestrians. It was ten a.m. on a Tuesday, but no one seemed to be at work.

  A man was hanging from a telephone pole outside City Hall. A black dress shoe was on one foot, nothing but a sock on the other. The sign around his neck read Liar and thief.

  “Oh my God.” It struck me with a sickening, crystal clear clarity: That man was up there because of us. Because of me.

  Beltane watched out the window, an assault rifle across her legs. “I said this was going to get ugly. But I had no idea how ugly.”

  Neither had I. For every outright criminal who was being exposed the way Vitnik had been, two politicians were getting tripped up by one simple, straightforward question that people with apps kept asking them: Can we trust you? It was amazing how few could say “You can trust me” without goosing that needle. (That was becoming a thing—instead of calling it lying, people were calling it goosing the needle.) Some politicians were passing the test, and they were on the rise, replacing the liars. The question was, were there enough of them to avoid a leadership vacuum?

  The left side of the access road leading to the Target parking lot was lined with people begging exiting shoppers for food. There were hundreds of them—old people, young people, families with kids. Some were holding handwritten signs. A mother with a crying baby in a carrier on her back knelt in the grass, hands clasped, as cars passed. I’d watched scenes like this on the news, but actually seeing it hit me hard. When banks collapsed, real people lost their jobs, their savings. It cascaded down. I was responsible for this.

  Not all of it, I reminded myself. The economy had sucked before we released the truth app. There had always been people hanging around store parking lots asking for food and money. But not hundreds of them.

  The parking lot was a madhouse. There were lines out the door, and people selling food, water, batteries, and guns out of open trunks in the lot. Two heavily armed guards in tan camo patrolled the entrance.

  When three armed vets piled out of our van, I could see the security people tense. One came to intercept us in the lot.

  “You can’t come inside like that.”

  “Like what?” Beltane asked.

  The guy gestured at Beltane’s rifle. “Weaponized like that.”

  “Do you know who this is?” Beltane pointed at me.

  The guard cursed under his breath.

  Beltane folded her arms. “We’re here for his protection, not to cause trouble. We need supplies. You want to shop for us, or can we go inside?”

  The security guy pulled a walkie-talkie off his belt and consulted with someone. “Go on in.”

  We passed an armed, broad-shouldered female security guard who was asking each person the same question as they exited the store: “Did you steal anything?” She was wearing a truth app.

  Inside, the shelves were half empty. They had one brand of ketchup—seven dollars a bottle. Squat tuna fish tins, only with chicken instead of tuna, for eleven dollars a can. Two-liter Pepsi for twelve dollars. As my companions began filling three carts, I grabbed a fourth.

  Kelsey waved me off. “We got this. You’re here to gather intelligence, so go gather it.”

  I shook my head. “This cart’s for those people out on the road.”

  Beltane rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “You want to stop the van and hand out food? Before you know what’s happening, a mob will be tipping over the van and taking all the food.”

  “We’ll figure something out.” I dropped a dozen cans of the chicken stuff into my cart.

  * * *

  —

  As Kelsey and Beltane loaded the van, I set about creating care packages using the extra plastic bags I’d bought in Target. I didn’t have enough bags to give one to each person along the road, so I’d target the kids.

  “What the hell is this?” Beltane was looking toward the access road, where a dozen or more vehicles were fanning out, circling the perimeter of the parking lot.

  A bus in the convoy had Pilgrims of Truth painted across its side. There was also a police car with Truth stenciled in front of Police across its doors, and half a dozen motorcycles, their riders wearing gold helmets emblazoned with PoT in red. As the bus squealed to a stop, people poured out, all of them armed.

  “Crap.” Kelsey slammed the van’s rear doors shut and unslung her rifle. “What’s the plan? Try to drive our way out?”

  “Too many guns,” Beltane said. “Let’s hang tight and see what happens.”

  Pilgrims of Truth. There was a truth app involved in this somehow.

  Four heavily armed “pilgrims” jogged through the parking lot. One, a young woman, pointed at us and shouted, “Weapons!”

  A dozen pilgrims converged, surrounding us. Beltane and Kelsey pointed their rifles at the pavement halfway between us and the pilgrims.

  “Put them down,” said a thin guy in jeans and an oxford shirt who could have been an English teacher in a former life.

  “Tell us what this is about, and we’ll consider it!” Beltane shouted back.

  “You’re free to go after you pass the test,” the thin guy said. “If you’re not murderers, rapists, or child molesters, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  Vehicles were being waved through the access road a few at a time by gun-toting pilgrims. Other people were standing beside their vehicles as pilgrims with truth apps on their fingers interviewed them. It wasn’t hard to piece together what was going on: they were using truth app to search for bad guys.

  We’d hoped the truth app would expose criminals, but we never imagined this. I explained what I thought was going on to Kelsey and Beltane, and after a quick consult, they set their weapons down.

  The thin guy approached as others snatched up our weapons. I hadn’t noticed the truth app he was wearing. He came to me first, opened his mouth to say something, and stopped.

  “Holy…You’re Sam Gregorious.”

  I nod
ded, hoping being Sam Gregorious was a good thing to people who seemed to be heavily into the technology I had helped develop.

  He stuck out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. More than a pleasure—an honor. Marcus. Marcus Hamlyn.” He put a hand on my shoulder and turned. “Hey, can you believe this? This is Sam Gregorious.”

  Surrounded by grinning faces, I shook a dozen or more outstretched hands as people talked excitedly about how no one was going to believe it back at the center. One woman asked to have her picture taken with me.

  Beyond the ring of admirers, three men were being led at gunpoint toward the building.

  “What are you going to do?” One of the three men—short, maybe twenty—asked. The pilgrims with the guns didn’t answer.

  Seeing the woman take a picture with me, a half-dozen other pilgrims had lined up to do the same.

  A guy put his hand on my shoulder. “Thank you. It’s an honor.” He smiled as the next person in line snapped our picture.

  The three men were being lined up against the wall.

  “I was sixteen. It was forty years ago. I’m not that person anymore,” one of the men against the wall said. “There’s a statute of limitations—”

  One of the pilgrims raised a handgun to his ear and fired.

  “We already know you haven’t killed anyone, don’t we, Sam?” Marcus Hamlyn said, grinning.

  “Yes, we do.” I tried to match his friendly tone.

  Marcus turned to Beltane. “Let’s get you people cleared so you can be on your way.”

  A second shot rang out. The short guy, who had squeezed his eyes shut, dropped.

  “Have you ever murdered anyone?” Marcus asked Beltane, ignoring the gunshot.

  “Yes,” Beltane said.

  Marcus froze. “That’s the truth.”

  Beltane gave Marcus her best Beltane glare. “Everyone I killed was Russian.”

  “Oh, right.” Marcus looked down at her legs. “Duh. And you haven’t raped or molested anyone, or tried to?”

  “No. I haven’t molested anyone.” Her eyes were blazing with anger. I’d never met anyone who could convey so much anger with her eyes.